News Release Number: STScI-2007-22

Hubble Teams with Google to Bring the Cosmos Down to Earth

The full news release story:

BALTIMORE  Imagine cruising the heavens from your desktop and seeing all the
spectacular images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Exploding stars and faraway
galaxies are just a mouse click away through Sky in Google Earth.

Sky in Google Earth is produced by Google, the company that hosts the popular Internet
search engine, through a partnership with the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore, the science operations center for Hubble. To access the new feature, users will
need to download the newest version of Google Earth, available free of charge.

With Sky in Google Earth, you can travel across the vastness of the night sky, making
tour stops at all the popular Hubble images. Though these celestial objects are far away
from Earth, you can reach them in a few seconds with Sky in Google Earth.

"You have seen the Hubble images of objects such as the Eagle Nebula, the so-called
pillars of creation," said Carol Christian, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science
Institute and one of the developers of the Sky in Google Earth project. "With Sky in
Google Earth you can see where the objects are located in space, including the
constellations in which they reside. Then you can discover other cool objects in nearby
regions of the sky. And you don't have to know anything about astronomy to use the
program."

Travelers can begin their celestial tour by selecting "Switch to Sky" from the "view"
drop-down menu in Google Earth. From here, an object, such as the Eagle Nebula, or
even a category, such as colliding galaxies, can be selected from a menu. You will first
get a view of the sky showing the constellations surrounding your selected object. As you
zoom in, the constellations disappear and your chosen object emerges from the
background.

The image is set within a background of real stars and galaxies taken by two powerful
visible-light surveys of the heavens, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey. The Digitized Sky Survey comprises photographic surveys of nearly the entire
sky and contains about a million objects. The Sloan survey comprises images of hundreds
of millions of much fainter objects and covers more than a quarter of the sky.

"This is a fun program for amateur astronomers, scientists, educators, and the public to
explore space," Christian said. "It is like having the heavens at your fingertips, or your
own planetarium."

Pretty pictures aren't the only part of this versatile program. Click on the icon of the
HubbleSite logo and information on the object taken from the Institute press release or
photo caption will appear. Sky in Google Earth also will provide links to the Hubble
news database and other Hubble information, including the Hubble Heritage project.

About 125 Hubble images, spanning the life of the telescope, are currently included in
Sky in Google Earth. Over the telescope's lifetime these images have been meticulously
prepared for the public in collaboration between the Institute's science visualization
experts in its Office of Public Outreach, and the worldwide community of astronomers
who use Hubble. The images have become iconic all over the world; gracing the covers
of science journals, record albums, and pop culture, and even making cameo appearances
in Hollywood science fiction movies.

Christian and her co-developer, Space Telescope Science Institute
astronomer Alberto Conti, plan to add the public images from 2007, as
well as color images of all of the archived data from Hubble's Advanced
Camera for Surveys. Newly released Hubble pictures will be added to the
Sky in Google Earth program as soon as they are issued, Conti said.

To add even more interest and adventure, Conti and Christian hope to
help other observatories, such as the National Optical Astronomy
Observatory and other NASA missions, add their images to Sky in Google
Earth.